Back in Flatland

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer summarizes the late 19th century book Flatland as an analogy for the often-one-dimensional faith that exists our time:

tIn 1884, an English schoolmaster named Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a story about a two-dimensional world called Flatland, inhabited by various shapes (circles, squares, etc.). In Flatland, there is height and width but no depth—the shapes are stuck in two dimensions. But one fateful night, the main character, a Square, is visited by a Sphere from the three-dimensional world of Spaceland.

The Square is dazzled and dumbfounded, and when he tries to tell his fellow Flatlanders about Spaceland and a third dimension, he is locked up.

Over the last few hundred years, what seems to have happened to a great many of us is the exact opposite. Whereas we once understood we lived and moved and had our being in an enchanted three-dimensional world of limitless mystery and wonder, we’ve been duped into devolving back into Flatland. We’ve willingly locked ourselves up in a flat world under the pretenses that doing so would provide us control, comfort, and certainty. Science does it by rejecting all reality that cannot be measured in a beaker. Christianity does it by rigid biblical literalism.